Maria took up the books with emotion. "They come," said she, "perhaps,
from a wretch condemned, like me, to reason on the nature of madness,
by having wrecked minds continually under his eye; and almost to wish
himself--as I do--mad, to escape from the contemplation of it." Her
heart throbbed with sympathetic alarm; and she turned over the leaves
with awe, as if they had become sacred from passing through the hands of
an unfortunate being, oppressed by a similar fate.

Dryden's Fables, Milton's Paradise Lost, with several modern
productions, composed the collection. It was a mine of treasure. Some
marginal notes, in Dryden's Fables, caught her attention: they were
written with force and taste; and, in one of the modern pamphlets, there
was a fragment left, containing various observations on the present
state of society and government, with a comparative view of the politics
of Europe and America. These remarks were written with a degree of
generous warmth, when alluding to the enslaved state of the labouring
majority, perfectly in unison with Maria's mode of thinking.

She read them over and over again; and fancy, treacherous fancy, began
to sketch a character, congenial with her own, from these shadowy
outlines.--"Was he mad?" She reperused the marginal notes, and
they seemed the production of an animated, but not of a disturbed
imagination. Confined to this speculation, every time she re-read them,
some fresh refinement of sentiment, or acuteness of thought impressed
her, which she was astonished at herself for not having before observed.

What a creative power has an affectionate heart! There are beings who
cannot live without loving, as poets love; and who feel the electric
spark of genius, wherever it awakens sentiment or grace. Maria had often
thought, when disciplining her wayward heart, "that to charm, was to be